Författare: Emma Shortis Adjunct Senior Fellow School of Global Urban an

On the Saturday before Election Day, I travelled from Washington DC to Charlotte, North Carolina, to attend one of Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris’ last campaign rallies.

It was extraordinary how many women were in the crowd – young Black women in particular. There were also older, suburban, white women who looked like they could have been Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren’s sister or cousin.

There were many men, who were just as enthusiastic. But they were far outnumbered by the women.

Harris was warm and charismatic, and the women in the crowd had such a huge reaction to her. They saved their biggest cheers for her lines about reproductive rights – North Carolina has very strict abortion restrictions, which are affecting women across the state.

Overall, though, I got a sense of cautious optimism from the crowd. There was absolutely no complacency. People were very nervous and anxious about the impending election against Donald Trump, especially since North Carolina was one of the seven key battleground states. You could sense a kind of distrust in the broader American electorate.

Cynical decision-making and misogyny

One of the focal points of Harris’ campaign was her outreach to women voters. She made this election about freedom for women to make decisions about their own bodies and reproductive health.

And while this message did resonate with many women – in particular younger women – it didn’t with others. According to exit polls by the Associated Press, 47% of women over the age of 45 voted for Trump, as well as 43% of women aged 18-44. More than half of white women overall also voted for Trump (53%).

Exit polls by CNN also found that while Harris did better than Hillary Clinton in 2016 with white women with college degrees, white women without degrees overwhelmingly supported Trump.

This says a lot about the decisions that some women made in the election. It seems possible that what Trump was able to do was give these women enough wiggle room to reconcile what might seem to be otherwise irreconcilable. For instance, they could perhaps believe that Trump wouldn’t actually implement a national abortion ban, simply because he has said he would not. Or they may simply believe that Trump’s policies wouldn’t necessarily apply to them.

I think this led to some potentially cynical decision-making among voters, much as there was in 2016.

And as expected, Harris also did worse than Trump among men. At least some of this – alongside the voting patterns of white women – comes down to structural racism and misogyny and the toxic mix of the two. Trump’s entire campaign was structured around appealing to men and mobilising them to vote, in particular younger men.

There was clearly a level of discomfort among men with the idea of a woman president. And there’ll be a lot of recriminations about Harris’ inability to appeal to those men, even though she had an entire event devoted to “white dudes” and put forth an economic plan specifically for Black men.

I think she did run an effective campaign overall, judging it on the basis of campaign tactics, but the underlying structures and divisions of American politics were hard to overcome. Trump didn’t create these divisions, but he exploits them like no one else can.

This is also partly because the Democrats – even Harris’ campaign – seemed either unwilling or unable to really address these structural divisions, economic inequality and their own role in the greatly changed economy in the US, dating back to the decisions of the Clinton administration in the 1990s.

Where to now for the Democrats?

Harris also had to walk this impossible line in attempting to be the “change candidate” while not disavowing the Biden administration.

There’s been a lot of attention in the US media today about a moment in early October on The View, a popular talk show, in which Harris was asked what she would have done differently than Biden over the last four years, if given the chance. And she said nothing came to mind.

It’s entirely possible the Democrats will take the wrong lesson out of this campaign. There are recriminations already coming from the right of the party that Harris had moved too far to the left and should have spent more time trying to appeal to Republican voters in states like Pennsylvania.

But I think you could make the opposite argument – that the Democrats failed to listen to their base in places like Michigan, where there was so much anger for the Biden administration’s support for Israel in its war on Gaza. In the Democratic primaries earlier this year, for instance, some 100,000 people in Michigan voted “uncommitted” instead of for Biden.

And when you consider the fact that Rashida Tlaib, the only Palestinian representative in Congress, was re-elected with a huge majority in Michigan, as was Representative Ilhan Omar in Minnesota, this suggests Harris’ campaign did not mobilise the base in the way that it needed to. They didn’t listen to what the base was telling them.

The Democrats need to look now at offering real structural economic change that addresses inequality and a reassessment of the US role in the world.

They can’t underestimate the appeal of Trump’s line about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, for instance – that this wouldn’t have happened under a Trump presidency. Many Americans are exhausted with American-led wars or American involvement in wars overseas – and I think that’s another thing the Harris campaign and Biden administration were either unable or unwilling to hear that. Läs mer…

As Americans vote in one of the most important presidential elections in generations, the country teeters on a knife edge. In the battleground states that will likely decide the result, the polling margins between Democrat Kamala Harris and Republican Donald Trump are razor thin.

These tiny margins, and the general confusion around American politics today, make it impossible to predict the outcome.

The polls might well be wrong: the electorate may have shifted dramatically since 2020 in ways that will only reveal themselves after the election. The reality is we do not know much of anything for sure, and we may never be able to untangle all of the threads that make up the knot of American politics.

After two assassination attempts on Trump and incumbent President Joe Biden’s dramatic decision to leave the race in August, it is entirely possible this election will throw up more big surprises. But as things stand, there are three broad possibilities for what will happen on Election Day.

All of them throw up their own challenges – for the United States, and for the world.

Possibility 1: the return of Trump

Trump may make history and win back the White House. Only Grover Cleveland has managed to get elected a second time as president (in 1892) after suffering a defeat four years earlier.

If Trump does win, it could be via a similar path to the one he took in 2016 – by once again sundering the “blue wall” and winning the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan.

This feat will likely mean his campaign tactic of mobilising men has worked.

A Trump victory would represent the culmination of a generational project of the American right. A second Trump administration would be very different from the first – the movement behind Trump is more organised, focused and cognisant of the mistakes of the first Trump White House. It would also face considerably weakened democratic guardrails.

The implementation of Trump’s radical agenda, alongside some or all of the broader far-right agenda detailed in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, would radically reshape American life and create political and economic chaos.

The rest of the world would have to reorient itself, once again, around Trump.

Trump may make history and win back the White House.
AP Photo/Mike Stewart

Possibility 2: Harris makes history

It is entirely possible Harris makes history – not only by beating Trump, but by becoming the first woman and woman of colour to win the US presidency.

Like Trump, if Harris does win, it will likely be through one or more of the battleground states – in particular, Pennsylvania and Georgia.

For Harris, victory will likely come via high turnout by women and voters of colour, particularly African-Americans, or through a combination of turnout by this core Democratic base and swing voters in key states like Pennsylvania.

How Harris wins – and by how much – will be crucial, both to the immediate aftermath of the election and to the shape of a future Harris administration.

A big question: can she win by enough to head off resistance by Trump and the movement behind him? As Australian writer Don Watson has noted, a Harris victory would likely be taken as an existential defeat by the MAGA movement.

How Trump’s supporters react to such a defeat – and how US institutions react to their reaction – will be a critical test for American democracy.

If Harris does win, it will likely be through one or more of the battleground states.
AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin

Possibility 3: too close to call

This brings us to the third possibility: the polls are correct, and it’s such a tight race that the margins in the battleground states are in the thousands of votes, or even less.

If it is that close, counting could take days. And there could be recounts after that.

While conspiracies abound, a delay in the result like this would be an entirely predictable and normal outcome. In the United States, there isn’t one system for counting the votes; elections are run by the states on a county-by-county basis, and each state does it differently.

Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, for example, legally can’t start counting mail-in votes until the polls open on Election Day.

Then there is the supposed “blue shift” or “red mirage” that sometimes occurs on election night.

There are now many ways to vote in the US – in person on Election Day, early voting before Election Day or by mail-in ballot. And the time it takes to count these different ballots can vary. So, it may appear as if one candidate is winning early in the night (say, when in-person votes are counted) only for their opponent to slowly turn the tide (when mail-in ballots are counted).

Counting could take days. And there could be recounts after that.
AP Photo/Mike Stewart

In the 2020 election, this meant early Trump (“red”) leads were gradually lost to the Biden (“blue”) votes. Researchers found that counties won by Biden counted more slowly, on average, than those won by Trump – hence the so-called “blue shift”.

This is an entirely normal – and legal – phenomenon. In Nevada, for instance, state law permits mail-in ballots to be counted four days after Election Day, so long as they were postmarked by Election Day.

Trump and his surrogates like Steve Bannon, however, have exploited the differing times it takes to count votes to peddle baseless conspiracy theories, undermining Americans’ faith in their own democracy, and to incite unrest.

By baselessly declaring victory in 2020 on the early “red mirage” tallies in key states before all the votes were counted, Trump was able to create what Bannon described as a “firestorm” – one that eventually led to the insurrection of January 6 2021.

This could very well happen again. Bannon, in fact, has just been released from prison after serving four months for contempt of Congress, and could once again be a driving force in any post-election challenges by the Trump campaign.

Trump, meanwhile, lied again this week when he said “these elections have to be, they have to be decided by 9 o’clock, 10 o’clock, 11 o’clock on Tuesday night” – laying the groundwork for further election conspiracies.

Delays are normal – but fraught

Trump has made it very clear he will not accept another election loss. If he does lose, he or his surrogates will attempt to weaponise similar conspiracy theories again. They may also use legal challenges to vote counts as they did in 2020 – both to contest the result and to once again mobilise the MAGA movement.

In the event of close margins, it’s also possible some states will go to a recount.

There are different rules for this in different states. To take one example, if the margin is within 0.5% in Georgia, a candidate can request a recount.

In the 2020 presidential election, Biden narrowly defeated Trump in Georgia by 0.25%, which triggered a full hand recount of the votes. The Associated Press declared Biden the winner of the state more than two weeks after Election Day. A second recount was later reconfirmed by Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger.

Again, this is a normal part of the process. It ensures all votes are counted accurately and the result reflects the democratic will of the American people as best as the (admittedly, deeply flawed) system allows.

Such a delay, legitimate as it would be, would elevate the already very real risk of further political violence and instability in the United States.

In the event of close margins, it’s also possible some states will go to a recount.
EPA/ERIK S. LESSER

None of these outcomes is inevitable. 2024 is not 2020; nor is it 2016. What happens next in America depends on the movement and interplay of so many tangled threads, it is impossible to see where old ones end and new ones might begin.

In all of this, only one thing is certain. Whatever the result – and however long it takes to come through – the divisions and conspiracy theories that have destabilised American politics for so long will not be easily or quickly resolved. That knot may well prove impossible to untangle. Läs mer…